What Carl Sagan said about climate change in 1993

We are not concerned about the environment today, but since the 1990s there has been a big change in the way people see this need to improve the world. Popularizing an idea, as with climate change issues, has its bright side, which is increased engagement with the cause, plus more resources to address the issues.

However, there is also a downside, which is the vulgarization of the idea, shallowly simplifying environmental issues so that more and more people can understand it (and adhere to it).

From this simplification there is a snowball being created. Activists get involved and make a movement exacerbated by the cause, the media publicizes, attracting more people to the movement, and the public increases. From this moment on, everything becomes a war of egos, who does more for the environment.

To understand a little about this, just read what scholar Carl Sagan was saying in 1993 about climate change and how it changed in just a few years:

“These profound changes, all caused by life forms we tend to regard as 'primitive' and, of course, by processes we describe as natural, ridicule the fears of those who think that men, with their technology, have reached 'the end of nature'. '. We are extinguishing many species; we can even destroy ourselves. But this is nothing new on earth. ”

What Carl Sagan means by this is that we could do whatever we wanted for the planet, but "Mother Nature" herself would eventually destroy us. On Earth, we've had five - or six, controversy - mass extinctions, long before humans, who wiped out all the fauna and flora there was.

It would not only be about polluting less, after all, the number of people in the world has only been growing and there does not seem to be a likelihood of decreasing in the short term. Unfortunately, we could not address this issue in just a few years.

Today we no longer have Carl Sagan to light our way into the future, but we can keep an eye on the young Greta Thunberg, who has a different look at environmental issues.

Do you agree with this idea?